Today, diagnosing a computer system crash (due to operating system or device driver software bugs, hardware errors, configuration problems, or the like) is a very time consuming and expensive process. Typically, a system administrator or developer is left to access books, websites, or colleagues, and often resorts to trial and error to determine what exactly caused the system crash. The diagnosis is generally manual and involves setting particular diagnostic configurations, rebooting the system (likely many times), manually evaluating the diagnostic results, and attempting to reproduce the crash.
In some operating systems, when a crash occurs, a dump file may capture the operating state of the computer at the time of the crash. The traditional dump file helps solve the mystery of what caused the crash, but is typically a very large file. For instance, large systems may have several gigabytes of memory. Writing out the traditional dump file may take upwards of thirty minutes on such a system. Users typically disdain that much down time, and administrators prefer to avoid such time-consuming steps toward diagnosing the system crash.
Moreover, as suggested above, using the information stored in the dump file has traditionally been a time-intensive, manual process. A system administrator or developer is left to read many lines of information in an attempt to determine what caused the crash. Hours of human intervention may be spent simply identifying the diagnostic steps to be taken in search of the offending component that caused the crash.
Further complicating the diagnosis of system crashes is that they are often difficult to reproduce. For example, a device driver may have a bug that does not arise unless memory is low, and then possibly only intermittently. In that case, a test system may not be able to reproduce the error because it does not reproduce the conditions.
In sum, diagnosing system crashes has long vexed system administrators and users of computing systems. A system that overcomes the problems identified above has eluded those skilled in the art.